Transformative Change: The System and Nature

ConSci

May 25, 2020

8 min read

Transformative change is forming systems and societies that are different to the status quo. Here, we present a series of four blogs regarding this topic: i) The system, ii) The system and nature, iii) The alternatives, iv) Creating change. We recognise that this series is influenced by our own lived experiences. For full disclosure, these lived experiences have taken place in the Global North, by two white women. We fully acknowledge others have had, and continue to have, different experiences and we would love to open up a discussion around how we can make transformative changes that are just and sustainable.

Key Points

Since the Enlightenment, nature and society have been widely viewed as separate in the Western world.
Capitalism has been seen as something that acts upon nature in two major ways: overexploitation and the fact that ‘the polluter rarely pays’.
Current approaches to neoliberalise nature work on the notion of “win-win”: the commodification of nature and use of market-based solutions to support both ecological sustainability and economic growth.
However, while there have been some successes, on the whole they continue to fail to protect our biodiversity and our planetary systems.
New strands of thinking have emerged that move past the duality of nature and society. This work questions capitalism as an economic system and instead perceives it as a way of organising the unpaid work of nature for continued economic growth and expansion.
We must recognise that capitalism cannot be separated from the processes of production, power, and environment-making. And thus, solutions cannot treat nature and society as separate.
Transformative change of the system is required in order to holistically address all these elements.

In Article 1, we investigated the features of capitalism and how 'the enclosures' transformed the feudal system into a capitalist one. We explored the advances and threats that led to the beginning of neoliberal policies in the 1970s. We examined how neoliberal ideology maintains its dominance and in what ways it has failed to provide for the many. In this article we will explore Western understandings of nature and society relations, including how capitalism is understood to impact nature. We will also look at the ways in which nature has been neoliberalised, why these solutions aren’t sustainable, and how to reconceptualise our understanding of nature-society relations for transformative change.

Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (c.1818)

The way in which the environment and society is understood today cannot be divorced from its history. In the Western world, the dominant view is one of dualism: a Cartesian split with nature on one side and society on the other. This understanding is deeply rooted in Western history and, in fact, can be traced back to the beginnings of Christianity but is more often considered a product of the ‘Enlightenment’. This split has led to hierarchal ideas of human dominance over nature; ideas that nature can be tamed, commodified (turned into something that can be sold), and exploited through our human systems, for our human needs. The capitalist system has increased the speed and extent to which nature has been and is exploited, with devastating consequences.

Capitalism has been seen as something that acts upon nature in two major ways: overexploitation and the fact that ‘the polluter rarely pays’. As we discussed in Article 1, under a capitalist system, commodities are made and sold for a profit. Here’s the problem: much like the entrepreneurs who produced wool after the enclosures, it is in the capitalist’s best interest to produce as much as they can at as low a cost as possible. However, if everyone follows individual self-interest, we get a tragedy of the commons situation, whereby individuals behave in contradiction to the common good by depleting or overexploiting a shared-resource system e.g. overfishing. Capitalism’s endless need for accumulation, the pressures it imposes on nature, and the production of wastes creates an ecological rift (rupture) of nature’s feedback loops. Karl Marx, developed this notion in the 1860s when “soil exhaustion” had become a key concern for capitalist society. He argued that capitalist agriculture was exploitative and created rifts that disrupted the soil nutrient cycle.

Then you have the problem of externalities. An externality is the effect of a positive or negative action on a third party (e.g. pollution) where the third party is not involved in the creation of that effect. Externalities are not reflected in the market price of a product or service i.e. the ‘polluter rarely pays’. Economists consider environmental degradation as a negative externality. For example, if a factory creates pollution while making a product, that pollution may pose a serious health risk for the local community or degrade the air or water quality. Regardless, the factory owner does not directly pay that additional cost to keep the air and water clean or address health issues. If the costs of human health and environmental degradation are not counted, there isn’t much reason to not pollute.

The argument for nature’s neoliberalisation is that we are failing to protect nature because we do not value it enough. In response, solutions to this problem involve pricing, valuing, and finacialising nature: state intervention and spending is minimised, and markets are relied on to “save” the natural world. You turn biodiversity into ecosystem markets and ecosystems into green infrastructure and ecosystem services. The idea is that of a “win-win” approach: the commodification of nature supports both ecological sustainability and economic growth. While there continues to be support for this approach, on the whole it continues to fail to protect our biodiversity and our planetary systems. There are several reasons for this failure, including the impossible task of determining the economic value of nature, consumers lack of engagement in voluntary markets (e.g. voluntary markets in carbon offsets, whereby individuals voluntarily pay firms to reduce emissions to cover the costs of externalities), and the limited power of ‘corporate social responsibility’ to achieve real change. However, the main reason as to why market-based solutions cannot work long-term is because they continue to perpetuate the notions and practices of a growth economy.

Nature is being put in the context of wealth creation and economic growth. This is important for two reasons. The first is that often profit, not environmental protection, remains the primary goal:

“the uniqueness of a Green Economy is that it can directly turn natural capital into economic value whilst maintaining it, and conduct total cost accounting” (UN, 2011)

The second reason is that, economic growth is turned on its head and no longer seen as a problem but as the solution:

“Low Carbon Green Growth Roadmap for Asia and the Pacific: Turning Resource Constraints and the Climate Crisis into Economic Growth Opportunities”(UNESCAP, 2012)

This creates what Fairhead and Scoones (2012) have called a ‘market for repair’. Every crisis becomes an opportunity for more profit. So you ‘doubly value nature: for its use and for its repair’. The damage caused by current economic practices creates the foundations for the green growth economy of repair. But there is increasing evidence that economic growth degrades biodiversity. As Sir David Attenborough states, ‘anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist’.

While it is important to understand the potential for neoliberal solutions to do good in some circumstances, solutions that continue to prioritise economic growth, economies of repair, and market-based solutions cannot protect our planet in the long-term. As the Chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Sir Robert Watson, states:

“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide…Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

In order to begin imagining different ways of achieving this transformative change, the alternatives to the status quo, it’s important to break further past the dualism of nature and society. We need to stop seeing society and nature as separate, as acting upon each other but as part of one process of constant change through which nature, humans, and human systems are deeply interconnected. This is something that Jason Moore, from the University of Binghamton explores at length in his book, ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’. He argues that capitalism is part of nature, not in that it is ‘natural’, but in that it shapes our environment, and is thus environment-making. At the same time capitalism relies on and is shaped by nature, through the unpaid work (what can be taken for free or ‘low-cost’) it provides for capitalism’s continued expansion.

For capitalism to exist and maintain itself it needs to appropriate the unpaid work of ‘the Four Cheaps’, Food, Energy, Labour-Power, and Nature. Here, Nature includes humans that were, and in some cases are still, not considered part of ‘civilised society’ i.e. enslaved peoples, colonised peoples, indigenous peoples, and women. Now, it’s important to define what Moore means by appropriation; let’s use the example of a forest. Capitalism didn’t pay for its ‘production’, so, at first, it can be taken for free (or low cost), it can be appropriated. But these resources aren't unlimited. Once you have to pay for their reproduction (e.g. planting new trees for later exploitation), the cost of that reproduction lowers the amount of profit available for accumulation. If capitalism, the growth economy, cannot accumulate, cannot grow, it falls into crisis. To avoid that, it will look for a way to expand into new frontiers, to find more of the Four Cheaps to be appropriated, tipping the balance back in its favour. These frontiers can either be geographical frontiers (e.g. relocating sugar plantations) or technological frontiers (e.g. the steam engine).

Slaves at Boone Hall Plantation - Womens’ unpaid work - Deforestation

The Sugar Commodity Frontier, 1450-1800, is an example of just that. At first the capitalist system could grow by appropriating the Four Cheaps in the region (free or ‘low cost’ nature and the unpaid work of slaves). Interestingly, the largely industrial nature of sugar production and labour processes were influenced by sugar cane’s ecology, which required cutting, milling, and boiling to happen within 48 hours. Both skilled and unskilled labour was required and specialisation led to the division of labour by age and gender. So, industrial capitalism was, in fact, started and shaped by (through necessity) the ecology of the sugar cane. As overproduction and soil erosion added to the costs of reproduction, the potential for profit decreased. When this happened, capitalism needed to expand into new frontiers otherwise it would fall into crisis. By the 17th century the centre of sugar production had shifted from Madeira, to Brazil, and then on to the Carribean islands. It was, in fact, the environment-making, the transformations of Barbados and Jamaica into sugar plantations in particular, that provided the finance for the industrial revolution in the UK. “The textile mills of Manchester were built on the mass graves of slaves and devastated soils and forests of Barbados and Jamaica” Moore (2016). So what we see is this intricate, intertwined, interconnected play of production processes, power, and environment-making, all through and by capitalism.

Moore’s analysis maps onto centuries of global history and is much more complex and detailed than presented here. However, it is not without faults. It most notably lacks developed suggestions as to how we might live in a post-capitalist society. But what it does do is this: it moves past duality, the separation of humans and nature. It questions capitalism as an economic system and presents it instead as a way of organising the unpaid work of nature (as well as Labour-Power, Energy, and Food) for continued economic growth and expansion. We must recognise that capitalism cannot be separated from the processes of production, power, and environment-making. And thus, solutions cannot treat nature and society as separate.

As we have seen, the capitalist system maintains itself through continuous expansion, exploitation, and appropriation. It is a system that is fundamentally incompatible with the protection and restoration of biodiversity in the long-term. As a result, while neoliberal solutions have continued to achieve economic growth, they have failed to achieve their other goal: ecological sustainability. It is becoming increasingly recognised that transformative change is the only way to holistically, and thus effectively, address environmental and social crises. Check back next Monday to read our next article, where we will discuss alternatives to the status quo as steps towards transformative change.

Kathleen Drake and Alice Lawrence